Joe Biden’s appointment of General Lloyd Austin is making the news today. Most of the coverage has been simple factual reporting. Some of the article titles emphasized that if confirmed he’d be the first African-American to hold this important Cabinet position:
There were at least two opinion pieces which had the same argument against the selection of Gen. Austin.
Jim Golby, is a senior fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin, has been a special adviser to Vice Presidents Joe Biden and Mike Pence and to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The tile of his OpEd in The NY Times caught my eye this morning:
If you have a subscription it is worth reading his entire rationale for making such a blunt statement. If you don't I offer an excerpt for consideration.
After providing a history lesson about George Marshall and his roll in Harry Truman’s decision to fire General MacArther the author concludes:
After four years of relative, if erratic, autonomy under Mr. Trump, military leaders may chafe when civilian national security leaders ask to check their homework. To some extent, that is healthy. Too much friction can also stop or slow progress, true, but a certain level is necessary for proper governance.
The need for experienced leadership in the Pentagon to manage this friction is vital. As even George Marshall realized, Mr. Biden would be wise to select a strong civilian who is up to the task.
At Marshall’s confirmation hearing, Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson asked him about civilian control. Marshall reflected that as a second lieutenant, “I thought we would never get anywhere in the Army unless a soldier was secretary of war.” But he added, “As I grew a little older and served through some of our military history, particularly the Philippine insurrection, I came to the fixed conclusion that he should never be a soldier.”
Marshall understood that military training and experience can be inadequate preparation for the political challenges facing a defense secretary. Marshall, like General Mattis, served because the president asked him to do so. But the MacArthur episode demonstrated that a retired general was not, in fact, the right person to help Truman keep under other generals under control.
President-elect Biden should not put Lloyd Austin, nor any other recently retired general or admiral, in the same position. General Austin is a fine public servant, and he may well continue his service to the nation out of uniform. But the Pentagon would be the wrong place for him to do it.
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There is an article in The Atlantic which makes similar arguments. (free until you’ve run out of clicks here). It is by neoconservative Eliot A. Cohen, dean of The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. From 2007 to 2009, he was the Counselor of the Department of State under Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. He is the author most recently of The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force.
This article concludes with a strong statement: it is a pity that the president-elect has made such a fundamental blunder.
Civilian control of the military is a vital precept: It is embedded in the key documents of the American founding. One of the most damning indictments of King George III in the Declaration of Independence is that “he has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.” The president was made commander in chief precisely so that a civilian, and not a soldier, would be at the pinnacle of the military chain of command.
The waiver of the law for Marshall made sense because of the emergency of 1950, and the sense of peril that hung over the country. A similar amendment for Mattis was warranted because the United States had just elected a malignant narcissist, ignorant of just about all matters required for sound conduct of the national defense, and totally lacking in respect for the boundaries that must circumscribe presidential use of the armed forces. The clearing of Lafayette Square by uniformed troops and Trump’s dragooning of Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley into joining him for a swaggering walk to an unmolested church were evidence of his inclinations. It is noteworthy that both Esper and Milley were, in retrospect, appalled by their violation of civil-military norms, and publicly apologized for them.
There is no such emergency now. Austin may have been a perfectly fine general, but there are others as well or better qualified to serve as secretary of defense—Michèle Flournoy, for example, or Jeh Johnson, both deeply versed in national-security matters and of a temperament and disposition to lead the Department of Defense well.
John McCain is dead, alas, but if he were alive and to ask me to testify yet again, I would—but to argue in the strongest terms against waiving this law. Having made good choices for national security adviser and secretary of state, it is a pity that the president-elect has made such a fundamental blunder. Congress should not enable him to make an appointment that would have more in common with the behavior of shaky democracies and authoritarian governments than the most powerful and long-established republic on the planet. It would be a bitter irony for an incoming administration to strike a different kind of blow at the democratic norms that it is so clearly, in other domains, keen to recover and restore.
I thought it would be useful to provide a forum for Daily Kos readers to weigh in with their opinions.
My own opinion is to consider this choice based not on history and not on the overall principal of civilian control which I think is important. I’d base it on who this man is and what he in particular will bring to the position as Secretary of Defense to justify asking for an exemption to the 7 year retirement* from the active military service rule.
* (Corrected: I originally wrote it was 10 years. Originally the law required a 10-year cooling-off period (which Congress in 2008 reduced to seven years. Austin retired in 2016.
Tuesday, Dec 8, 2020 · 4:58:41 PM +00:00 · HalBrown
9:00 AM: Since I posted this at 4 AM (Oregon time) the issue has been written about and discussed elsewhere. For example in Politico and on MSNBC.
“I winced a little,” said a former GOP national security official on the number of retired senior officers already working on Biden’s transition.
Tuesday, Dec 8, 2020 · 5:15:57 PM +00:00 · HalBrown
The Daily 202: Democrats would need to twist themselves into pretzels to give Biden’s Defense pick a waiver, Wash Post.
Several Senate Democrats spoke quite eloquently four years ago about the need for civilian control of the military as they opposed a special waiver to a federal law requiring that a secretary of defense be out of uniform for at least seven years to be eligible for the job.
All of them insisted that their objections were principled and had nothing to do with President-elect Donald Trump or retired Marine Gen. Jim Mattis, his nominee.
President-elect Joe Biden’s selection of retired Army Gen. Lloyd Austin to be secretary of defense will offer an early and crucial test for Democrats who opposed Mattis’s waiver. Now that a Democrat will be in the White House, we will get to gauge the sincerity of their supposed convictions.
“Civilian control of our military is a fundamental principle of American democracy, and I will not vote for an exception to this rule,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) said in January 2017.